Monthly Archives: December 2014

I recently had a large typewriter tattooed onto my arm. Although I love the aesthetics of the drawing, I can’t claim that the image has particular resonance with my own history as a writer. My first writing tool was a Mac SE computer, but somehow a drawing of an outdated Apple machine seemed less iconic than a beautiful Underwood.

I felt I somehow needed to mark myself as a writer in a permanent way, even though I don’t feel like one on most days. Most of the words I compose go into press releases and web postings that don’t bear my name, but do contribute to the general struggle for workers’ and human rights. I feel good about the text I compose and the people I do it for. But the politics and passion are tempered by professional considerations. I write for work, but rarely for myself anymore.

Like many authors, I used to hate selling but a few easy techniques have made me love it and have fun. This can happen to you too, once you’ve mastered the moves that clinch a sale when your real book meets a live customer. Last Sunday copies of my new paperback flew out the door with almost one-third of the traffic that shopped at Ottawa’s Perfect Books bookstore between 1 and 3 p.m. (20 loners or couples, six books sold.) Here’s my advice; I hope it works just as well for you:

Prepare for your event with a phone call, follow-up visit to the store and a query just before you come. By the time you get there, you will know the easiest way to drop off your books and the best place to park your car. The owner will have consignment copies of your book on the shelves, posters in the window and a…

In any life, there are events that shake us to the core. Some occur when we are very young, and they remain the reach of memory. Others persist in detail so heightened that it verges on the surreal, as if painted onto our retinas by a Salvador Dalí employing a tiny brush.

When I was eighteen months old, I was trampled by a boar hog with tusks. He ripped my head open, left a deep dent in my skull and nearly took out my left eye. Had my father not been able to kick the five-hundred pound beast away just in time, he would have eaten me for breakfast.

I have no recollection of the event whatsoever, except what I was told by my parents, and the occasional nightmare, in which hogs are rooting around in my bed.